This porting effort has long been abandoned. It has had no updates since october
2002. The information in this page is only for historical purposes.

Debian GNU/NetBSD

Debian GNU/NetBSD is a port of the Debian Operating System to the
NetBSD kernel and libc (not to be confused with the other Debian BSD ports
based on glibc). It is currently in an early stage of development - however,
it can now be installed from scratch.

How to install

Download the floppy images from the above link. For laptops, use the laptop
images - for all other machines, use the normal ones. Write these images to
floppies. Boot off the first disk - you will be prompted to swap disks. Once
the menu system has appeared, follow the instructions that you are presented
with.

TODO

Packages that need to be produced

any of the libs in /lib or /usr/lib that aren't
currently packaged need to be

base-passwd is desperately unhappy

UPDATE:
We now have a basically working base-passwd for FreeBSD and
NetBSD (modulo a segfault). Thanks to Nathan and Matthew.

equivalents of console-tools/data need to be produced

UPDATE:
Packages that provide the basic functionality have been produced

netbase needs to be rebuilt. This is probably one of the more awkward
ones - we have source for the BSD versions of ifconfig et al, but the
semantics are somewhat different. If we stick with BSD semantics, we
have to deal with any scripts that assume Linux-style semantics. Does
the Hurd follow Linux-style semantics, and if not how have they dealt with
this?

UPDATE:
Marcus Brinkmann from the Hurd Team
clarified this a bit and sketched possible solutions. The current
approach is to use the NetBSD tools and modify ifupdown in order to
provide the same interface to the user.

procps (probably best to just provide the BSD versions)

sysvinit
(BSD init doesn't support runlevels. We can hack it to work
like Debian with a single runlevel without too much trouble)

UPDATE:
sysvinit is up and running, Matthew has managed to boot natively
into Debian GNU/NetBSD on i386! There are still some glitches
wrt. boot scripts, but it's an important step
towards a fully working system.

XFree86
(Nathan is having a go at this currently, and discovered that
ed is needed, which
segfaults. Several people are investigating on this issue.)

UPDATE:
ed works when building with libed.a. Also, quoting Joel:
X11 is in a workable state! It's not packaged
properly, but it works. Expect packages soon.

gcc-3.0
(Neither gcc-3.0.1 nor gcc-current are in a usable state for
NetBSD at the moment. Joel has a working version of gcc-current
and posted the results
of the test suite. libstdc++ is still very unhappy.)